A sobering vision of industrial civilisation as an embattled fortress, a redoubt of hard borders in an apocalyptic age of global death and disorder, this is also the cruellest and most amoral aspect of Lieven’s argument, given that it is the nations of the industrialised North who have created this catastrophe, and the largely blameless peoples of the global South who will be forced to bear the consequences.
Many will rightly find this vision hard to bear, condemning it as a heartless form of “lifeboat ethics”, placing our own survival over that of the rest of the world. Lieven’s response is, simply: Yes. At this point, he argues, there is no alternative. If liberals don’t harness civic nationalism to preserve democracy within their own societies against the growing global chaos, ethnic nationalists will come to power pledging to defend the global North without any pretence of either democracy or of liberalism. The realistic alternative to liberal nationalism in this apocalyptic scenario is not universal socialism, but fascism. What we are asked to do is cruel, selfish and morally unbearable: but the alternative, total civilisational collapse and the final extinction of democracy, would be even worse.
Instead of welcoming the climate refugees, our moral responsibility now lies, in Lieven’s view, in minimising the catastrophe heading their way as quickly and dramatically as possible. Greens will need to accept an immediate shift to nuclear power; conservatives to a politics of degrowth, on the basis that our current levels of consumption are already about to collapse.
Therefore, he insists that a Green New Deal — a total rebalancing of national economies, on something approaching a war footing, around halting carbon emissions — is urgently necessary, and — counterintuitively — that it should be led by the security establishment and the political Right. The dismissive attitude to climate change displayed by conservatives must be jettisoned immediately, otherwise they will lose everything they profess to hold dear.
The idea of a conservative, even nationalist Green New Deal is an intriguing one, given the proposal’s current pigeonholing within a certain brand of Left-liberal politics. In recent years, the idea has moved from a fringe concern of the Left wing of America’s Democratic Party to a mainstream policy under Biden’s candidacy, with similar proposals being adopted by the European Union and the Labour Party.
Yet as a consequence of the all-consuming culture war, conservatives oppose the idea on the frivolous grounds of partisan political identity. Lieven insists the scale of the coming emergency is too great for such Culture War luxuries. Instead, he argues, the political right must harness the most powerful political force in industrial societies to deal with the challenge: that of nationalism, because only nationalism “can overcome one of the greatest obstacles to serious action; namely, that it requires sacrifices by present generations on behalf of future generations.”
Indeed, by reframing the fight against climate change as a battle for the survival of nations, we are more likely to secure the cooperation of the non-liberal powers of Eurasia, currently deeply wedded to the exploitation of fossil fuels. Putin, Modi and Xi are “ruthless but sincere nationalists, dedicated to the power and survival of their nations. Convince them that something threatens those nations, and they will act.”
With some exceptions — that of Palestine, say, Kurdistan or Scotland — it is fair to say nationalism has not had a positive image in recent decades, with the concept having turned full circle over the last century from an idea actively promoted by liberals to enhance global peace to one seen as the greatest, darkest threat to the same.
Harnessing the power of nationalism to fight the climate war will therefore horrify Greens and eco-socialists, as Lieven observes, but he argues there is no other choice. After all, history shows that people will put up with any amount of discomfort, even death, to fight for the survival of their nations, whereas the fate of strangers on the other side of the earth remains an object of total indifference.
If Greens truly believe the threat of climate change is as great as they claim, then they will have to jettison the utopian baggage they have appended to the environmental movement, like their wildly unpopular fantasies of open borders or of universal liberal governance. Progressives need to remove these “ideological luxuries,” Lieven argues, because “if we fail to limit climate change, the resulting world is extremely unlikely to be friendly to the causes they have tried to load onto the climate change bandwagon.”
The natural environment ought to be a point of political consensus between the Right and Left: after all, many conservatives, at least in Europe, feel a great emotional attachment to the survival of their nations as green and pleasant lands. Yet despite — or as the historian Anna Bramwell has observed, because of the historic origins of the Green movement in radical Right-wing politics — most modern Greens, with their idealistic preference for the universal over the particular, decry such powerful drives as eco-fascism.
But “to reject the entire tradition of attachment to local and national landscapes in the West is to throw out the bathwater, the baby and the entire municipal drainage system”, Lieven argues: “if action against climate change depends on the abolition of nation-states then there will be no action. Existing nation states may well eventually collapse due to climate change, but the result will be not world government but universal chaos.”
Lieven’s vision is stark and apocalyptic. It would be comforting to believe he is wrong. Perhaps it is not too late to avoid catastrophe, though science warns us it probably already is. Perhaps the hundreds of millions of climate refugees from the global South can be resettled in the industrialised North without inducing social conflict and collapse: liberals and leftists, committed to a fairer world than the one that exists, will argue that they can; conservatives, through comparison with human history up to now, that they cannot.
Citing the work of writers like Yascha Mounk, David Goodhart and Paul Collier, Lieven argues that social homogeneity, by fostering solidarity, is necessary to concerted political action, and that in contrast a surfeit of cultural diversity brings only political division. It is an interesting reflection of the state of the climate debate then that, in a Guardian discussion last year, the main American figurehead of the Green New Deal and avatar of Twitter socialism Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez broached these issues with Greta Thunberg, observing that one objection against her proposal is that “because of the racial diversity here, and issues with immigration and so on, there’s no way we can come together in order to combat this”.
Thunberg unfortunately does not answer the question — indeed, she seems not even to understand it, indicating she is perhaps an imperfect figurehead for the global climate movement. Yet as Lieven makes clear, Greens and ecosocialists will need to find answers for these questions sooner than they would like, before their opponents do. The central issues roiling global politics, of the battle between cosmopolitanism and nationalism, between the universal versus the particular, are not going away. Green issues are not a distraction from these questions: instead, within decades, the accelerating climate crisis will heighten the ferocious political battle over place and peoples to a level never seen before in human history.
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SubscribeI’ve been saying this for years. If the Greens were really green they’d be pro Brexit, pro nationalism, pro borders and anti immigration. They’d be pushing managed population reduction and self sufficiency. Our army would be a beefed up defensive force designed to keep intruders out and to help manage national emergencies like floods or fires. If climate change is coming then the current truckle of illegal immigrants will become a flood – and swamp us entirely. It’s purely about self preservation now and if you think we should sacrifice our families and our nation for the sake of some utopian fantasy of multiculturalism then you need to give your head a wobble.
Open borders will also be the undoing of the socialist utopian dream, since it is evidential that they will attract ever more migration to benefit from it, leading to an eventual collapse of the social cohesion needed to support it. But since the left is guided by ideology rather than experiential knowledge, its adherents will continue to deny the obvious contradiction, and instead blame the selfishness of capitalist “rich” countries for failing to bring about the global socialist dream.
This is all based on the dubious claim that there is man-made global warming. What if there isn’t What would the author say the future looks like then?
Why does it matter, so far as the thesis of this article is concerned, whether global warming is man-made or not?