Planetary Politics. Lorenzo Marsili

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СКАЧАТЬ signal its unprecedented planetary character? Counterintuitively, it was the very existence of a deeply interconnected world that was revealed by the path of its implosion. And so the rupture of imperial globalisation was at once an unveiling and a deepening of the unity of the world.

      Take a character such as Philip Raven, an economist in the service of the League of Nations and the protagonist of H. G. Wells’s 1933 futuristic novel The Shape of Things to Come. Raven dreams of a world government and confesses that if it was the First World War that turned this idea into a working hypothesis, it was the Great Depression that led to the final realisation that human society had become one indivisible and integrated economic whole.

If the crumbling of European sovereignty, as Hannah Arendt recalled, leads to a hardening of totalitarian logic; if the new political impotence that Trotsky described leads to an increase in aggressiveness and to a recoiling on national identities; then it is always from this same contradiction that the theorisation of world unity, revealed and deployed through its crisis, takes a leap forward. Indeed, Wells’s insights are not confined to the field of literature but accompany a new attempt to restore a political dimension to the system of global interdependence. The inter-war period was the backdrop to the first great proposals for the ‘United States of Europe’, from Jules Benda to Altiero Spinelli, and for a world order based on the League of Nations; it was precisely from this crisis that the search for the reorganisation of a new world system began. And it is in this context of unripe globalism that an ideology that would define the lives of billions of people decades later would also be born: neoliberalism. We will come back to this shortly.

We can perhaps think of the image of the ouroboros: the famous symbol of a snake biting its own tail and forming a circle that perpetually overcomes and renews itself. The implosion of universal Europe represented a turn of the screw, or better, a full circle of the ouroboros, which further tightened the universal character of the world, overtaking the limited remit of Europe itself. The ouroboros is the symbol of a process of becoming-world of the world, a process that deploys itself through the crisis of an order – the painful moment the snake reaches and bites its tail – that already contains within itself a further deepening of world interdependence, another round of the circle.

      From a war that threw a world system to dust and yet prepared the cocoon for its overcoming emerged a planet that was increasingly intertwined and that towered over a weakened national politics. It was Antonio Gramsci who clearly identified the new playing field: ‘The whole post-war period is crisis’, he wrote, and ‘one of the fundamental contradictions is this: that while economic life has internationalism or better cosmopolitanism as its necessary precondition, the life of states has increasingly developed in the direction of nationalism.’⁶ Or, in other words, the global deployment of economic forces tramples and overcomes weakened national polities.

The history of the twilight of universal Europe presents the opening sequence of the long crisis of the nation state. And if Gramsci’s words appear to be written today, that is because it is at this historical juncture when first emerged the contradiction that now occupies the front pages of our newspapers.

Notes

      1 1. Stefan Zweig, Messages from a Lost World: Europe on the Brink (London: Pushkin Press, 2016).

      2 2. Pankaj Mishra, Age of Anger: A History of the Present (London: Allen Lane, 2017).

      3 3. Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation (Boston: Beacon Press, 2001).

      4 4. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarism (London: Penguin, 2017).

      5 5. Leon Trotsky, ‘Is the Slogan “The United States of Europe” a Timely One?’: http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1924/ffyci-2/25b.htm.

      6 6. Antonio Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere (Torino: Einaudi, 1975): Quaderno 15. Translation by the author.

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